1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to conversational systems and, more particularly, to a system and method for providing fast and efficient conversational navigation of, e.g., pages of CML (conversational markup language) of a particular site (e.g., Web site) or a conversational service using a skeleton or tree structure that describes the site, a portion of the site, or a service when the user first connects to a service provider, or complex dialog associated with a given service.
2. Description of Related Art
In the near future, conversational systems such as NLU (natural language understanding) and NLG (natural language generation) as well as dialog management are poised to become an essential component of human/machine interfaces. To make such conversational systems more functional, such systems should allow a user to express queries as naturally as the user would in a normal conversation. Indeed, such systems should afford mixed or directed initiatives in which the user may complete, correct, modify or disambiguate his/her queries based on the reaction of the system, as well as the capability of using queries to shortcut complex hierarchical menus.
Conventional instantiations of natural dialog systems, however, are designed such that the user follows a relatively narrow logic in the sequence or the elements that constitute his or her query. This is true with FSG (Finite State Grammar) or pure statistical NLU systems. Indeed, NLU is concerned with the understanding of the input for a given context, application or query mode.
Moreover, with conversational systems, it is difficult to present a complex service to a user (e.g., a web page, hierarchical DTMF menu, NLU/NLG systems with multiple options and a form-based implementation) when a voice output is only available as output. Typically, the user must navigate through multiple web pages or DTMF menus to find the information of interest. Accordingly, a system and method for providing the necessary information to allow a user to quickly browse through a site or available dialog service without having to follow and listen to every possible page or menu leading to the desired service or transaction is highly desirable.